Irina is in one of the Doric’s armored cars, stuck in traffic on her way to Fantôme. Picking at the armrest, she once again checks her implant’s logs and once again finds it unbreached, as she knew she would, for in fact it’s unbreachable, its defenses exaggerated beyond all necessity. It’s like a locked-room mystery—no one breached her implant, and she’s never transferred data off of it, and yet her memories have found their way out into the world.
She remembers Cromwell’s somewhat exaggerated interest, and it occurs to her to blame him, and it seems like he must be in some way involved, but there isn’t enough evidence to convict. Also, if he’d been so keen on getting his hands on her memories, why bother having her talk to his AI? She must be missing information.
She looks up Lederer’s Vancouver gallery on her phone. It’s just months old, owned by a pretty couple in their mid-thirties, and a quick search on their names brings up the sale of their tech company and the consequent access of wealth and their many subsequent seed-stage investments and a stalled attempt to produce independent films and their practiced smiles shining from the society blogs and in other blogs they’re nearly naked on the coarse grey beaches of Franz Josef Land for that huge annual week-long rave where they burn the wicker giant and there’s a pervasive sense that they’re searching quite desperately for the next source of meaning in their lives. She could imagine them locking on to the idea of recorded memory as art, if only for its novelty, but they don’t seem so substantial, and she doubts they’d have the nerve to face the inevitable counterattack.
There’s a lingering sense of their emptiness, and of their need to find some new way to connect, and then she says, “Oh!” for all at once she knows what happened, or in any case the channel by which her memories escaped her control. She clenches her fists but there’s nothing to be done, at least not for now, so she lets herself remember.
The clinic on the Malibu cliffs had walls of thick green glass. Sea fog hung in the air, diffusing the light. Looking down from the cliff edge, the surf’s violence was incredible, white water roaring over huge prisms of stone, the colossal wreckage of some recent collapse. Behind her, crablike drones with bodies of scoured copper moved cautiously through the brown grass, pausing only to disinter the roots of non-native plants. She’d heard that they were dumping these drones in the foothills, there to wander—robust and solar-powered, they would, over the decades, shift the ecology back toward how it was.
“If you’re ready, Ms. Sunden,” said the doctor in the lobby.
“Aren’t you afraid the cliff will collapse,” she said, “and drop you into the sea?”
“That’s an inevitability, ma’am. But it’s suitable, don’t you think? A constant reminder of our fragility, here, of all places? In any case, the geologists tell us that the rock will last for at least a hundred years. Everything has its time.”
She had come to help Constantin die.
Constantin’s father had built the dikes around Athens and, as far as she could tell, most of the rest of modern Greece. Handsome, affable, dissolute Constantin; he’d studied law half-heartedly, and then, in his early twenties, found his true vocation in high alpine skiing, and, later, BASE jumping. One August evening he’d put on a jet-black nylon wingsuit, surplus from German special forces, and launched himself from a Swiss mountainside into the fading air over a narrow valley in the Jura; he remembered the silence, he said, how his shadow had flirted with him, hovering close or far as the terrain rose and fell, but he didn’t remember hitting the updraft—later, he would learn that it was the exhalation from one of the hidden caverns where the Swiss cloistered their attack planes—or the fall, or the long tumble over the granite boulders, the dense grasses, the tiny reticulated streams.
They’d put a chip in his arm, when he was a child, that scanned his vital signs once a second. Noting their collapse, the chip sent an alert, annotated with his GPS and the elapsed time since cardiac arrest, first to the family office, then to the Swiss montane police.
Four hours later he was in an acute trauma clinic in Bern. The doctors, despairing of the damage to his skull, formally notified his father of their decision to end life support. His father wrecked his office in his newly renovated Provençal villa, then sought advice. His wealth opened doors, dissolved obstacles, and soon his attorneys were ordering the Swiss doctors to stabilize their patient pending his transfer to the care of the surgeons of Ars Memoria, LLC, already en route from Seattle. Twenty-six hours later Constantin opened his eyes, the twenty-fourth recipient of the Memoria implant, the fourteenth to wake from anesthesia.
“I have a request. Something intimate,” he said, eleven years later, as she sat by his bed, the glass walls darkening against the Malibu sun as it slipped toward the hemisphere of sea. He looked spent, in his web of tubes of blood and worse, as though he’d died weeks ago and was in the process of being embalmed. He’d taken drugs, he’d said, to stay lucid a little longer, so he could wait for her.
“Name it,” she said, squeezing his hand, afraid it was sex, and would that even work, now, but the door had a lock, and there were worse things.
“I don’t want to be alone, when it happens, and it’s happening soon.”
“I’m here,” she said, knowing it for a slight thing, but all she had to offer.
“Will you open your memory to me?”
First she did nothing, thinking of her other memory, that bright and inviolate core of self, but in his need he was like a child afraid of the dark (but rightly afraid, she thought, for the great night is about to swallow you whole, and there is nothing more to be done about it), so she turned on her implant’s wireless. Every device in the room became a beacon. His implant was trying to connect, once a second, every second, and as she accepted the connection the world became informed by crippling weariness and stark fear of the imminence of the end and the pale, worried woman at his bedside clutching his withered hand and beginning to cry.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice doubled. He studied his face through her eyes, the image echoing between them, and then she watched as words coalesced—language like foam forming on black seas of thought—and he said, “You know, I envy you your health.”
He thought of the first time he’d emailed her from the sanitarium in Berne. Who else, he’d written, could possibly understand??? Seven months later she’d been in Denver to see a client while he was there skiing; he’d felt awkward, approaching her in the hotel bar, knowing that everything he said would stay with her forever. “I lose nothing,” he’d said, words coming in a rush. “I remember all the skies, all of them, how the light changes by the second. I remember how the leaves flicker in the wind.” He’d looked uncomfortable, abashed by his poetic effusion. “The vividness never fades. It’s always been here, but before it just flowed over me, like I was standing in a river without getting wet.”
“How many of us are left now?” he asked. The skin below his eyes was black as ink and she fought the urge to call for a nurse, a doctor, anyone. He saw this, as she saw his fear and his diffidence, and in the absence of even social deceit they arrived at shared certainties—that he was dying, that she would see him through it, and that, for the duration, they were as one person—and in these they found a degree of calm.
“I’m not sure. Styrszinski is off in the Caucasus, last I heard, making a survey of all the animals and plants, but it’s been years since he answered email.” She thought of the old biologist, his interminable digressive monologues on natural history, while Constantin wished he’d met him, studied harder, been someone else. “There was that boy in Brazil, the prime minister’s son, but I understand the family’s been in lockdown since his father was assassinated. There’s Stasi, that German performance artist who blew his trust fund getting the implant even though he was in perfect health—he’s still alive, but he’s been stuck in the same endlessly branching run-on sentence for the last seven years. I like to think that, on some level, he’s very happy.” Strange, they both thought, how one needed to talk even when one’s thoughts were open.
“There are things I need you to know,” he said, wanting to linger on in her, as the world darkened, but only in his eyes. He remembered a house on the cliffs in the Dodecanese, reachable by boat when the wind was calm, not at all when it was blowing. The house was old and his mother had renovated endlessly while he hid in the shadows of its courtyard and slept in its garden in the sun. He remembered sitting on the edge of a dam his father built, daydreaming about flying over the precipitous slope of stained white concrete. He remembered the bank of a frozen river in what Irina thought was Hyde Park in winter, waiting in the cold till the woman came, how he hadn’t cared how little cover the brush afforded, the heat of her skin, how cold the snow. She left first, telling him to wait lest someone see, and he sat there studying the impression her body had left behind. Much later, after their final, bitter parting, he had taken to walking through the park past her window, whenever he was in London, and looking at the light there, or its absence, but he never saw her again, and now he never would. He remembered telling his father that his old injuries were worsening, how the old man had stood up behind his desk, face turning red as he lifted a finger like a pompous orator and swore to move the course of scientific history through sheer force of will. At least you were loved, Irina thought, though the memories, it seemed, could almost be anyone’s, as though the major images of a life were dealt randomly from a fixed deck of cards. He remembered skiing over new powder down a mountain’s sheer flank, rapt in the ancient game with gravity and snow, how he desired always to be on that mountain, any mountain, every mountain in the world.
His eyes had closed, and his breathing was shallow. He thought of an old woman closing his fingers over the pomegranate seeds staining his palm, perhaps his grandmother, but by then he was thinking in Greek, and she tried not to see the monitor that showed his blood oxygen falling. He clung to her hand, still wanting to live, regretting the pill that would have given him another hour, which, on her arrival, he had put aside because he hadn’t wanted to keep her.
His words in her mind. Tell me stories. Give me a part of you. Something to take with me. Don’t let me be alone.
She gave him her summer in Singapore, the liberty and solitude, the waves’ reverberation in the emptying downtown. She gave him the day she’d opened her first Swiss bank account, how adult she’d felt when she signed the papers. She gave him the cold in the cheap hotel on the outskirts of Boston, how she had paid for it because her lover, Philip, her first, had had no money at all. How thin he’d been, her fingers counting his ribs under his frayed, worn shirt. His body was like a child’s, though she hadn’t seen it at the time. They’d held each other under the one thin duvet as he whispered on and on about what he’d noticed and his ambitions and then something shifted in him and his eloquence, which she valued, had vanished, supplanted by a need that had surprised her, and, accepting it, she’d felt oddly maternal as she’d guided him in.
By then Constantin’s breathing had become chains of gasps, and his other memory accumulated little more than his nausea and pain and the clarity of her sensorium. She cast about for some last, great thing to give him at the end and settled on her night on the deck of a tramp steamer in the equatorial Pacific. She’d kept waking and drifting off again, eager to see the space elevator, and finally there it was, like a column of darkness, at least at the base, a thin vertical absence of stars. Her father had told her it was mankind’s great ambition to build a tower that pierced the sky, an elevator into low orbit that would link the terrestrial and sidereal spheres, a phrase she is almost sure of—it sounds like him—though the memory has a vagueness, like all her memories from before the implant, and she half suspects she made it up. And they’d almost done it, he’d said, though the tower, built, had been abandoned, victim of the deflating economy and spectacular failures of engineering. It had never borne a single payload into space, a scandal in its day, but all that had been long ago, decades before her birth, and for her the tower had only ever been the most elegiac of ruins.
Constantin’s eyes moved randomly behind his lids and he thought he was dreaming her and her grief felt unmanageable but sharing her story let her focus on him. The steamer had reached the atoll at dawn, the tower red as blood in the new day’s light, tapering inward as it rose into the sky, its shadow stretching to the limits of the west. Though the sun had scarcely cleared the ocean, heat shimmered over the jungle that covered the atoll; once there had been a city there, the unimaginatively named Base Camp, its rotting structures now become steep-sided green hills. Titanic buttresses rose around the tower’s base, the clean lines of their geometry blurred with overgrowth, and she found them thrilling, like the monuments of a lost civilization, which, she supposed, they almost were.
Gulls rose in cacophonous masses as she stepped onto the reeking, guano-caked pier. She had an old but carefully serviced Colt revolver in her pocket—she didn’t like guns, but it seemed necessary to have it if she was going to travel that far beyond the pale of the law. She sat on a rusting bollard, clutching her serious technical expeditionary backpack and dangling her feet over the water as she watched the ship sail away.
She wasn’t the first to visit. Fifteen years ago an Italian hippie had come and explored and written a guidebook that she’d found buried on his long forgotten blog. With a crudely machine-translated English version on her phone, she’d picked her way over the wide, low valleys that had once been thoroughfares. As she got closer to the tower it was occluded by the buttresses but she soon found her way to the ascending spiral of the ramp around the base. Giorgio’s notes assured her it was sound, made to support the heaviest construction equipment, unlikely to collapse even after a thousand years. It was a while before she realized that what she’d taken for cracks in the buttresses were in fact inscriptions in many languages, perhaps all languages, and every one some version of “I am the first stone in the road to the stars.”
The bottom of the ramp was covered with graffiti but as she climbed the graffiti became sparser. The ramp was made of something very hard and probably lighter than it looked, one of those replacements for concrete that hadn’t quite worked out. Here and there green shoots grew in tiny cracks, the species of the plants changing as she ascended, and she’d reflected that all the seeds must have been carried by the wind.
She’d meant to study the elevator’s architecture, as long as she was on it, but she found she just wanted to keep climbing. Her legs were soon aching, and, confronted with the blue gulf of space, she could scarcely bring herself to approach the ramp’s edge, but still she climbed, infused with a sense of the most radiant purpose, for the tower was the symbol of all that was forever out of reach, and at night, in her bedroll, the tower’s promise and the thought of its apex and the glittering light of the stars were almost more than she could bear, but neither intense contemplation nor orgasm nor her understanding of the physics nor the exact record of the stars’ shimmerings helped at all, and the strain was such that she’d thought she’d come apart, lying there high above the world, though of course all that had happened was that she’d fallen asleep, and then she noticed that Constantin’s blood oxygen had settled at zero, and that his breathing had stopped. She looked into his other memory, the last eleven years of his life’s experience fixed forever in deep strata of data, immobile now, and somehow cold. Of course, she thought, I should have known, this is what death is, this stillness in memory.